tever,--or else be content to ride the
last poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and
infirmities, to the very end of the chapter.

As he dreaded his own constancy in the first--he very chearfully betook
himself to the second; and though he could very well have explained it,
as I said, to his honour,--yet, for that very reason, he had a spirit
above it; choosing rather to bear the contempt of his enemies, and the
laughter of his friends, than undergo the pain of telling a story, which
might seem a panegyrick upon himself.

I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this
reverend gentleman, from this single stroke in his character, which I
think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight
of La Mancha, whom, by the bye, with all his follies, I love more,
and would actually have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the
greatest hero of antiquity.

But this is not the moral of my story: The thing I had in view was to
shew the temper of the world in the whole of this affair.--For you
must know, that so long as this explanation would have done the parson
credit,--the devil a soul could find it out,--I suppose his enemies
would not, and that his friends could not.--But no sooner did he bestir
himself in behalf of the midwife, and pay the expences of the ordinary's
licence to set her up,--but the whole secret came out; every horse
he had lost, and two horses more than ever he had lost, with all
the circumstances of their destruction, were known and distinctly
remembered.--The story ran like wild-fire.--'The parson had a returning
fit of pride which had just seized him; and he was going to be well
mounted once again in his life; and if it was so, 'twas plain as the sun
at noon-day, he would pocket the expence of the licence ten times told,
the very first year:--So that every body was left to judge what were his
views in this act of charity.'

What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life,--or
rather what were the opinions which floated in the brains of other
people concerning it, was a thought which too much floated in his own,
and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have been sound
asleep.

About ten years ago this gentleman had the good fortune to be made
entirely easy upon that score,--it being just so long since he left his
parish,--and the whole world at the same time behind him,--and stands
accountable to a Judge